If you don’t have an unlimited pot of dough to underwrite your lifestyle and you’ve vowed to get your financial house in order, then you have to start to make some serious decisions about what you value.

By value, I mean what is really important to you?  What is the thing that you know you will use again and again and is really worth the money? This concept is something that you finally begin to really grasp when you have enough experience as a consumer to learn that the cheapest thing is not always the best buy. For example, shoes. Yes, I am playing into a stereotype – chicks and their shoes, but seriously. Would you rather have lots of pairs of shoes, even if they fall apart or are so uncomfortable that you end up walking home barefoot with blisters after a day at the office?

For me, I once loved having a million pairs of shoes. I think I had maybe 30 or 40 pairs -- many that brought a grimace to my face when I thought about wearing them after I wore them once or twice. While I had loved them to pieces when I was standing in the store and I even marveled about how cheap they were, eventually I ended up never wearing them after one or two disastrous, blister-inducing outings.

My point is, were those shoes really worth that great price? Probably not, in retrospect. So today, instead of buying lots of pairs of cheap, uncomfortable shoes, I buy few pairs of higher quality shoes. Yes, I sometimes will spend three times what I once did for one pair of shoes, but now I have shoes that I love, actually wear, cause me no pain (except temporary wallet pain), and last much longer.

What about you? What is valuable to you when it comes to how you spend money?